During his work for the White House, he highlighted his role in the crises due to the genocide in Rwanda and the peace agreements for Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Madeleine Albright, secretary of state during Bill Clinton’s tenure as president of the United States, has died at the age of 84, her family reported.
Albright had to flee from the Nazis in his native Czechoslovakia during World War II. She became recognized as a leading diplomat within the American administration. And she was not in vain, because she had to get involved in the two biggest foreign policy crises of the 1990s: the genocides in Rwanda and the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Of the latter, she highlighted her role in achieving the Dayton peace accords.
The also former US ambassador to the UN acknowledged that she had never understood why her country declared war on Iraq, she was always convinced that “the problem was in Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein was a torturer, but he was no threat.’ In her book ‘Madeleine Albright. Memories. America’s Most Powerful Woman’. “The attack on Iraq was an option, not a necessity,” she said. She believes that Saddam Hussein “should have been tried in an international court, just as Milosevic was”.
Born in Prague in 1937, and descendant of Jewish parents, the young Madeleine knew exile twice. Her family fled from Hitler, after the Nazi invasion of their country. Later – after the Second World War – they had to flee from the communist regime. “I have always valued people’s attachment to their roots, because I suffered the trauma of having them ripped out of me when I was a child.”
The book combines professional reflections with memories and the ins and outs of American politics. “I’ve tried to be honest,” Albright said, “even if I’ve had to be adamant about it.” He admits that “he hates losing.” He also acknowledged that, at the time of writing these pages, he clung to the advice of Gabriel García Márquez: “When you write your memoirs, remember: do not get angry.”
He does not hide that in the elections for the presidency of the United States, which will be held next November, he would like the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, to win. «I set out, when entering politics, to extirpate my partisan instincts, but I have failed». He communes with Kerry on his idea of foreign policy. «He believes that actions abroad should have a multilateral consensus, and I agree with him; I also agree that Europe and the United States should pull from the same cart and never in opposite directions; our economy, our security and our well-being will go better the more united we stay. He is horrified by Bush’s arms race. “The United States is a great nation, but not because of its weapons, and this is something that Kerry wants to explain to the world.”
Personality
In the book she says that she was a young girl “with quite a bit of personality”, but “no boy queued to ask me to dance”. True to her initial plan to be honest, she remembers her father’s ugly prophecy: “You’re going the wrong way and you’ll end up dragging yourself through the mud like a whore.” She said that she learned of her Jewish origins less than a decade ago. “Nobody bothered to tell me.”
He remembers, with irony, that his political life began to prosper the moment he divorced, in the early eighties. “I don’t know if it was a matter of cause and effect, but the fact is that it was.”
Albright’s memoirs have coincided on the market with those of his former boss, former President Clinton, but he thinks his own are less interesting. “I can’t compete with him, I would be delusional if he wanted to; he was president of the United States and I was a simple collaborator».
Regarding the controversial film by Michael Moore, in which he denounces alleged ‘ripping’ in the elections that led George Bush to the presidency, he said that the American institutions have to work so that “there are never again doubts regarding the processes elections in our country.
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